Twelve Facts about the Sun

Fact One

The official definition of a star like The Sun is a "Yellow G2 Dwarf." It is an
average, middle-aged star.

Fact Two

If the Sun was brighter, it would be hotter and would have burnt off its
hydrogen fuel billions of years ago. This means that, if the Sun is any
different to how it is now, life on Earth would not exist. It is the perfect
size, perfect age, perfect distance, perfect temperature and perfect brightness
for life to exist on a planet like Earth.

Fact Three

Everytime hydrogen nuclei fuse together to form helium nuclei, which results in
a burst of energy, heating up and powering the Sun, the Sun loses a tiny amount
of its mass.

Fact Four

If we could remove the bright, glowing surface of the Sun, we would see nothing
other than blackness. Only the Sun's outer surface shines brightly. The inside
of the Sun is complete darkness.

Fact Five

Light from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth, 40 minutes to reach
Jupiter
and 7 hours to reach the edge of the Solar System.

Fact Six

The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. This is
caused by the fact that the Earth spins, and is not due to the Sun moving, and
is the same in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

The setting Sun. Image published with kind
permission of
www.startrails.co.uk from Norman Penguin Productions

Fact Seven

In the same way that the planets orbit around the Sun, the Sun orbits around the
centre of the Milky Way galaxy, taking 225,000,000 years to complete a full
orbit, travelling at 800,000 kilometres per hour.

Fact Eight

Many centuries ago, people believed Earth to be the centre of the Universe, with the Sun as a planet
orbiting it. They believed that the Moon was the closest planet, followed by either
Mercury, Venus
or the Sun in the next closest position, with Jupiter and
Saturn orbiting furthest away.

Fact Nine

The Sun was formed, like every other star, from a huge swirling cloud of gas called a nebula. The
cloud contained all the matter which went together to form the Sun and its family of planets, moons
and hundreds of thousands of asteroids,
meteors and comets. In total, 99.8% of the matter in the cloud formed the Sun.
The other 0.2% formed all of the other objects in the Solar System. And, just in case you want to know what the mass
of the Sun is, it's about 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms!

Fact Ten

The Sun's gravitational pull is so strong that, even a
dwarf planet 5,900,000,000 kilometres away
from it (Pluto) is still kept in orbit of the Sun. There are more dwarf planets even further away
than Pluto which are kept in orbit by the Sun.

Fact Eleven

The Sun is almost half-way through its life, and at its most stable point in its lifetime.
Eventually, it will increase in size, eating up the Inner Planets and heating up the
Outer
Planets and their moons, before collapsing to become a very small White Dwarf.

Fact Twelve

If you could take a journey in an normal airliner flying at its normal speed (about 644 km
an hour) travelling from Earth to the Sun, it would take 20 years to reach your destination,
and that's without stopping.